It might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over damage done unless you made it worth their while. Indeed, maybe it was time to rethink this whole salvation business. Or maybe I was less desperate, less teetering on the edge than I cared to admit. Now, that was a refreshing possibility.

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination - the ingenious way alcohol seemed to lubricate everything from onerous chitchat to self-conscious sexual advances.

No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.

My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

I always look to people and think whether they seem well-loved or not well-loved. That's one way I walk through life. Do they have some core that withstands the ravages? Everyone gets pulled down in life and has good moments. But it always interests me how people withstand things.

I see depression as an exponentially developed version of a human condition. Meaning I always think in the end it's humanizing. People who never suffer from depression I find suspect. I assume Donald Trump is not a sufferer from depression.